Lawyers for former President Donald Trump told a New York judge on Monday that they oppose the media’s request to broadcast Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday.
Trump’s lawyers said in their letter to acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchán that the court’s rules require him to take into account potential security concerns.
“As Your Honor is well aware, this case presents extraordinary security concerns (including concerns related to the Secret Service) and we submit that any video or photographs of the proceedings will only increase these serious concerns,” they wrote.
Among the Trump lawyers who signed the new letter was Todd Blanche, who CNN reported recently joined the former president’s legal team.
Meanwhile, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office also responded Monday to the media request, saying it was leaving it up to the judge to decide how best to run his courtroom.
However, the district attorney’s office wrote that it would be “a defensible exercise of the Court’s discretion to exclude or restrict video, photographic, and radio coverage of the arraignment in order to avoid potential harm to the defendant, maintain an orderly proceeding, ensure the safety of participants in the proceeding, or for other reasons within the Court’s broad authority to manage and control these proceedings.”
But prosecutors also noted that “there does not appear to be a categorical prohibition on using cameras during an arraignment” under existing New York statutes and case law.
While the district attorney’s office stopped short of opposing the request, his attorney pointed out to Merchan that a similar request for audio and video transmission was filed for the 2021 arraignment in the tax fraud case against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.
The judge responded to that 2021 request by “allowing a limited number of photographs to be taken prior to the start of the proceedings,” prosecutors said Monday.
CNN is one of the outlets that requested access to the cameras for Tuesday’s arraignment.
